Diego Rivera Trivia
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49 free Diego Rivera trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Diego Rivera painted walls the size of buildings, joined and got thrown out of the Communist Party, sheltered Leon Trotsky, married Frida Kahlo twice, and lost the most famous mural commission in America because he would not paint out Lenin. He also claimed, probably falsely, to have eaten human flesh. Few artists give a quiz writer this much to work with. This set follows him from Guanajuato to Paris, where Modigliani painted his portrait and Cubism briefly claimed him, back to Mexico and the government mural program of the 1920s, then to San Francisco, Detroit and New York. You'll be asked about the Detroit Industry frescoes and who paid for them, about Man at the Crossroads and the photographs that let him repaint it, about the Calavera Catrina in the Alameda mural, and about the volcanic-stone museum he built for his pre-Hispanic collection. Easy questions cover his wives and his most famous walls; the hard ones cover patrons, assistants and dates. Fifty questions, every answer sourced.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Mexican city was Diego Rivera born?
Guanajuato
Guanajuato is where his parents, finding the small boy drawing on the walls of the house, answered by giving him wall space of his own to cover.
Q 02Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived in her family home in Coyoacán, now a museum, known by which name?
The Blue House
The Blue House, La Casa Azul, takes its name from its cobalt walls; after Kahlo died there in 1954, Rivera left it to the Mexican people, and it opened as a museum to her in 1958.
Q 03Rivera's murals helped inspire which of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies?
The Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration put jobless artists to work on public walls, an idea credited in part to the example Rivera set with his murals of American life.
Q 04The separate studio-houses built for Rivera and Kahlo in San Ángel were linked by what?
A rooftop bridge
A rooftop bridge was the only link between the two buildings Rivera commissioned from Juan O'Gorman in 1931, one for each of them, independent of each other and each with its own studio.
Q 05Kahlo's mother called her daughter's marriage to Rivera an elephant and a what?
Dove
Dove to his elephant: Rivera was tall, heavy and already 42, Kahlo petite, fragile and 22, when they married in August 1929.
Q 06Which unlikely patron paid Rivera to paint the Cortés Palace murals in Cuernavaca in 1929?
The American ambassador
The American ambassador, Dwight Morrow, was a great admirer of his work and gave him the commission just as Rivera's own political allies turned on him.
Q 07After studying in Madrid, Rivera spent most of the 1910s among the avant-garde artists of which city?
Paris
Paris gave him his avant-garde friends and then took them away: a violent quarrel with the critic Pierre Reverdy ended his friendships with the leading painters of his circle.
Q 08Which Italian friend painted Rivera's portrait in 1914?
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani turned their whole circle into a portrait gallery, painting Rivera along with Picasso, Soutine, Max Jacob and Rivera's lover Marevna.
Q 09Which style did Rivera enthusiastically embrace from 1913 to 1917?
Cubism
Cubism struck him as a truly revolutionary way of painting, but around 1917 the example of Cézanne drew him back toward simpler forms and vivid colour.
Q 10Rivera's autobiography makes what widely doubted claim about his youth in 1904?
He practised cannibalism
He practised cannibalism, he claimed, clubbing together with friends to buy cadavers from the city morgue; biographers file it with his other tall tales, such as kinship with an empress.
Q 11Which minister of education brought Rivera home for the government mural program in 1921?
José Vasconcelos
José Vasconcelos conceived the government-backed mural project to build a shared sense of nationhood after the Revolution, and gave Rivera his first wall in Mexico.
Q 12What was the title of Rivera's first mural, painted at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City?
Creation
Creation, painted in the wax medium of encaustic with gold leaf, cast as its figure of Song a model named Lupe Marín, whom Rivera went on to marry.
Q 13Rivera's late mural Glorious Victory attacks a CIA-backed coup that toppled the president of which country in 1954?
Guatemala
Q 21Which San Francisco institution's private lunch club commissioned Rivera's 1931 mural Allegory of California?
The Stock Exchange
The Stock Exchange got a two-storey staircase mural, dominated by a giant female figure of California, from a painter better known for attacking capitalism.
Q 22Calls to whitewash Rivera's Detroit murals in 1933 brought what?
Crowds
Crowds flocked to see them; the outcry had come from clergy and a Detroit newspaper, but the museum's patron stood firm and the murals stayed on the walls.
Q 23The main panels of Rivera's Detroit Industry murals show workers at which Ford plant?
River Rouge
Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz was the victim; Rivera shows the CIA chief Allen Dulles sealing the deal with one hand resting on a bomb that bears President Eisenhower's face.
Q 14Which political organization did Rivera join in 1922?
The Mexican Communist Party
The Mexican Communist Party took him in, then threw him out again seven years later, in 1929, though he went on calling himself a Marxist for the rest of his life.
Q 15Which photographer did Rivera paint holding an ammunition belt in his mural In the Arsenal?
Tina Modotti
Tina Modotti had modelled for his earlier murals, and their affair helped end his marriage to Lupe Marín; in the same mural Frida Kahlo hands out weapons.
Q 16Rivera's mural cycle Fertile Land fills a hall at an agricultural university in which town?
Chapingo
Chapingo's murals fill a former hacienda chapel, which Rivera turned into a shrine to the land and its revolution, with buried martyrs of the struggle feeding the corn that grows above them.
Q 17Which exiled revolutionary did Rivera and Kahlo take into their home in 1937?
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky won asylum in Mexico with Rivera's help and reportedly had a brief affair with Kahlo; he moved out in 1939 after quarrelling with his host.
Q 18Where did Rivera paint The History of Mexico between 1929 and 1935?
The National Palace stairwell
The National Palace stairwell tells the story across three walls, from ancient Mexico through the conquest to an imagined future, and Rivera kept returning to paint in the palace, on and off, until 1945.
Q 19Rivera went to Moscow as an official guest for the tenth anniversary of which event?
The October Revolution
The October Revolution's anniversary made him an honoured guest in 1927; he stayed about nine months, teaching and planning a mural, until the authorities ordered him to leave.
Q 20Which New York museum, then only two years old, gave Rivera a one-man retrospective in 1931?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art was co-founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, whose family went on to give him his most notorious commission.
River Rouge entranced him: before painting a stroke, Rivera toured Ford's giant complex making sketches, more thrilled than appalled by its machinery.
Q 24Which panel of Rivera's Detroit murals caused offence by casting a doctor and nurse as Joseph and Mary?
The vaccination scene
The vaccination scene sets a haloed child among a horse, an ox and sheep, like a Nativity; religious groups demanded its destruction, but the museum refused and it is still in place.
Q 25Rivera and Kahlo divorced in 1939 and remarried the following year on which occasion?
His birthday
His birthday: the simple civil ceremony took place on 8 December 1940, the day Rivera turned 54, and this time the couple stayed married until Kahlo's death in 1954.
Q 26Frida Kahlo's painting Henry Ford Hospital records what event from her stay in Detroit with Rivera?
Her miscarriage
Her miscarriage, as the loss of her pregnancy that July is usually described, produced what is often counted her first great painting, laid out like a Mexican votive picture.
Q 27Rivera's Man at the Crossroads was commissioned for the lobby of which New York tower?
The RCA Building
The RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, was meant to show Rivera between Matisse and Picasso, but neither could be secured and lesser-known painters took the flanking walls.
Q 28Whose portrait did Rivera refuse to remove from Man at the Crossroads?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin went in only after a newspaper attacked the unfinished mural as propaganda; asked to paint him out, Rivera replied that he would sooner see the whole work destroyed than mutilated.
Q 29Which Mexican film star stands at the centre of Rivera's 1953 mural on the Teatro de los Insurgentes?
Cantinflas
Cantinflas appears as a Robin Hood figure passing the wealth of the rich to the poor; an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the design was attacked as blasphemous and left out.
Q 30The mural that replaced Rivera's destroyed fresco at Rockefeller Center features which American president?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln stands among the builders in Josep Maria Sert's American Progress, which took the wall in 1937; Rivera had offered to add Lincoln to his own mural if the offending portrait could stay.